Kyotographie is Japan’s foremost festival of international photography. Held each spring since 2013, each edition has a different theme – and this year it is “Edge”.

It is a broad enough theme to allow for some freedom in the curation while evoking a sense of tension across the 14 exhibitions in the main Kyotographie festival.

More than 200 images, 400 magazines and 100 books cover the walls and tables of Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective, and it still feels like it’s only scratching the surface of this photographer’s extraordinarily prolific career.

Born in 1938, Moriyama was part of a groundbreaking generation of postwar photographers whose work appeared in magazines and later became defined by a look known as are-bure-boke (rough, blurred, out-of-focus). He is a photographer who has constantly questioned the meaning of photography and how it can be used. Now in his 80s he still photographs every day and publishes Record magazine.

Early on his image-making moved away from the western social documentary style to one driven by expression and feeling. Japan in the 1960s was no longer occupied by the US but that country’s presence was felt in the numerous military bases and in the influx of western culture. Moriyama used his camera as a vehicle to navigate this transitional period in Japan. His radical approach delved into popular culture and rising political unrest to produce dark and atmospheric images.

One brilliant project presented here is a series made for Asahi Camera magazine in 1969, which each month questioned a different aspect of news media. In the January issue, Moriyama looked at the impact of the assassination of Robert Kennedy in 1968 and, by photographing a TV screen that showed the image of the assassination and photocopying pages from newspapers, showed how a news story is mediated by images.

For the April issue he picked up a telephoto lens, at the time a new piece of equipment, and focused it on ordinary, unsuspecting people. The images resonate with film-noir cool and an eerie foreshadowing of camera surveillance and facial recognition in modern life.

Linder Sterling’s work is also routed in magazine culture. She began working on fanzines in Manchester at the height of punk, when mainstream media meant just three TV stations and newspapers. Fanzines, which could be made with little money at home on the kitchen table, were radical and exciting – and a way of getting her art seen.

Magazines – whether fashion, DIY or cheap pornography – all had a common denominator: women’s bodies, which Linder cut out and collaged with images of household objects, using surgical scalpels as precision instruments, to create provocative feminist photomontages.

She also fronted the post-punk band Ludus and worked with musicians, famously creating the album artwork for Buzzcocks’ Orgasm Addict, where a muscular woman’s body has an iron for a head and mouths on her breasts. The image is both simple and sophisticated and manages to be both sexy and subversive.

When she began to use her own body in photographs she introduced an element of performance in the photo sessions where everyday materials such as clingfilm, or images torn from magazines were used to create portraits that are almost like living collages.

Thandiwe Muriu is this year’s African artist in residence. She uses the brightly coloured and patterned wax cotton fabric, known as kitenge in Kenya and popular across Africa, to raise questions about identity, culture and female empowerment. The patterns have hidden meanings – one called “the eye of my rival” is worn to express jealousy – so it has a language of its own.

Her series Camo is shown in an old wooden building where kimonos are still made by hand. The women in Camo are dressed in kitenge and stand in front of backdrops with the same patterns, so that they almost disappear.

Muriu talks about feeling almost invisible to her community when she stepped away from what was expected of her to become one of Kenya’s few female advertising photographers. In her pictures, hairstyles reference pre- and post-colonial looks from across Africa and all the sitters wear surreal glasses that Muriu creates from everyday household items that block out their eyes.

I can’t help but be reminded of Linder’s collages of women cut out from pornographic magazines with everyday objects covering their faces.

On the first floor of a small building that was once a storehouse is a dark room with only one source of light coming from an iPhone suspended from the ceiling. The phone shows Fatma Hassona, a young Palestinian photographer in Gaza talking to the camera. On the other end of the video call was the film-maker Sepideh Farsi in Paris. They spoke over the course of a year from 2024 to April 2025. Footage from these conversations along with Fatma’s photographs resulted in the documentary Put Your Soul on your Hand and Walk. On 16 April 2025, Fatma was killed along with nine members of her family in an Israeli airstrike.

It is an incredibly powerful and moving experience to stand in almost complete darkness watching Fatma, who is often smiling and full of positive energy, talk about the reality of life in war-torn northern Gaza – the horrendous living conditions, the deaths of family and friends, as well as her aspirations and what photography meant to her.

Her need to show the world what was happening to ordinary people in Gaza was what drove her to photograph the horrors. When Farsi asks if she would ever want to leave, her answer is: “My Gaza needs me.” The exhibition also features a slideshow of her photographs from the war.

A rare piece of footage of the South African photographer Ernest Cole taken in 1969 is on display inside the exhibition of his book House of Bondage. It was filmed shortly after its publication, when he was out of the country and had just been banned from ever returning. He speaks directly to the camera, a young man – just 29 years old, exhausted and frustrated. House of Bondage was the culmination of years of work documenting the harsh realities of life under apartheid. It was also the first book by a Black photographer to show the experience of Black South Africans. The book was meant to be a vehicle for change, an exhaustive exposé that would be shown to people in power outside South Africa, but it fell to the most part on deaf ears.

The exhibition is like walking through the book, organised by chapter, with additional photographs, magazine covers and personal notes written by Cole. I am struck by how sensitive he was as a photographer – there is real beauty and warmth in the faces of the people despite the circumstances – and the narrative power in his compositions.

It is hard to think about what happened to Cole after House of Bondage as anything other than a tragedy. He moved to New York where he tried to establish himself as a photographer, getting assignments from the agency Magnum, but living in exile in a country riven with its own racist culture must have been an impossible struggle. In the end he abandoned photography and was made homeless. Living on the streets until his death from cancer in 1990.

As well as the 14 exhibitions in the main Kyotographie festival are 164 exhibitions in the satellite KG+ festival, which includes a juried exhibition. The winner is exhibited in the main festival the following year. There are also talks, workshops and a book fair. Add to this the programme of experimental music, which runs alongside the exhibitions and has spawned its own festival – Kyotophonie – and Kyoto feels like it is exploding with creative energy.